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If your business documents consist of hundreds or thousands of lines, you can make them easier to manage by splitting them into sections. Computer programmers often break code into manageable chunks, and you can do the same to your Microsoft Word documents. Word has a built-in Master Document feature that takes minutes to learn and helps you tame unwieldy documents into manageable sections that you can work with more productively.

Document Outlines

Outlines help people organize information; collapsible outlines help them manage large amounts of information in a small amount of space. Word’s Ribbon has an Outlining view that you can switch to by clicking “View” and then clicking “Outlining.” People often use this view to generate outlines in a single document. For instance, you might create several headings that serve as containers for text that appears below those headings. One heading named Sales may contain sales information while another one might have marketing information. After entering Outline view, you can turn any text into a heading by highlighting the text and pressing “Alt-Shift-Left.”

Master Documents and Subdocuments

Regular document outlines are fine, but you may need something a little more powerful when your documents become unusually large. Microsoft added a Master Document section to the Ribbon’s Outlining section that can help you manage those pages efficiently by turning groups of related text into subdocuments. A subdocument is a document that sits inside a larger master document. Using the Sales heading as an example, you could turn all the text in that section into a subdocument. You have the option to create as many subdocuments as you like and even make them expand and collapse.

Creating Subdocuments

Before creating subdocuments, you’ll need to identify the sections of the large document that you wish to split up. If the first 20 pages talk about budgeting, for instance, you could make that section your first subdocument. Do this by adding a descriptive heading at the top of the section and highlighting that heading and all the pages you want to include in the section. When you click “Show Document” and then click “Create,” Word adds a line at the top of the section and one at the bottom to let you know that you’ve created a subdocument. You can use this technique to convert other large sections of related information into subdocuments. When you are done, everything will look the same except for the divider lines that Word adds to separate the subdocuments.

Managing Subdocuments

You’ll understand the usefulness of subdocuments when you click the “Collapse Subdocuments” button in the Ribbon’s Outlining section. After you do that, all the document’s text disappears and you only see hyperlinks. Each section’s hyperlink contains the heading name you typed for that section. If you created two dozen sections, the hyperlinks would take up only two dozen lines because the text they contain is collapsed. You can expand the text by clicking “Expand Subdocuments.” After you expand all the subdocuments, you can double-click the “+” sign that appears next to each section’s heading to collapse that section’s text individually. Double-click the “+” sign again to hide that text.

Additional Subdocument Features

In addition to being able to find any section quickly in a large Word document by collapsing sections, you can also harness the power of document segmentation. Each section that you create becomes a physical file that resides on your hard drive. The file’s location appears as part of the hyperlink’s text. This means that when you double-click the white icon next to a hyperlink, Word opens the section in a new window. This allows you to work on your Sales section, for example, in isolation -- free from the distraction of surrounding text. Because you’ll only be working with one section, you should be able to find things faster than you would in a large document. After you set all this up, you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds; all subdocuments will exist as part of one master document, and you you’ll be able to double-click the white icon next to any subdocument’s hyperlink to work on that subdocument separately. When you switch to Draft mode by clicking “View” and then clicking “Draft,” everything returns to normal and you’ll see your original document and all its sections as a whole.

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About the Author

After majoring in physics, Kevin Lee began writing professionally in 1989 when, as a software developer, he also created technical articles for the Johnson Space Center. Today this urban Texas cowboy continues to crank out high-quality software as well as non-technical articles covering a multitude of diverse topics ranging from gaming to current affairs.

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Lee, Kevin. "How to Manage Large Documents in Word." Small Business - Chron.com, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/manage-large-documents-word-47398.html. Accessed 25 May 2019.

Lee, Kevin. (n.d.). How to Manage Large Documents in Word. Small Business - Chron.com. Retrieved from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/manage-large-documents-word-47398.html